About Clancy

Television, movies and even music videos feed so much content that our imaginations are no longer challenged the way they were when entertainment consisted of stories told ‘round the campfire. Books, and later radio removed a degree of the imagination factor, but still left us to construct our own visual pictures of places and characters. In a weird way, the internet has helped us to re-spark our imaginations. Out here we “meet” other people and we rarely ever really know if what we read is real or fiction, if these people are who they say they are, and often even our visual representations of these individual characters is often times left up to our imagination. Even when there are pictures, how do we really know? It’s highly unlikely, but conceivable that Helen is really a very imaginative and talented writer clad only in dingy tighty-whities sitting in front of his computer in a dirty apartment in Brooklyn. The only one who really knows is Luuk, and he can’t talk.

I was going somewhere with this, I swear. Oh yeah, names. Out here, we can be anyone we want to be, so what we call ourselves is often revealing. I often wonder what people think when they read the name Clancy.

As if you haven’t guessed (or done a dns lookup), my real name isn’t Clancy, its Shawn. And that weird word between the 3w’s and the dot net up in your browsers address bar is my last name, except in the non-cyber world there’s an apostrophe between the O and the F. (And yes, I know, the E and the A are reversed – that’s the way its supposed to be.) Anyway, it is a good German name, don’t you agree?

So… Why do I go by Clancy? Well, that’s actually a question you would have to ask my Dad. It was all his idea. You see, almost 35 years ago, my mother was waddling around very pregnant and she and my father were discussing baby names. My father suggested that if I was born a boy, I would be named Clancy. My mother, although horrified, was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would be born a girl and didn’t put up a single protest. Until I was born that is. And fortunately for me, she won. Ironically, neither remembers what the girls name was to have been.

Many, many years later I was posting quite frequently on several bulletin boards and going by the incredibly creative moniker of “Shawn.” Everybody else had cool names – Mephesto, Bubbles, Gryphon, Marina Bambina, Ariel, Roadguy, & Faceman – to name but a few and I secretly wanted a cool cyber-alias. One day the discussion turned to names and I told the story above about how I was almost named Clancy. Someone suggested it as a cyber-alias and it’s been that ever since.

One of these days I’ll finish building the front-end to this url and you’ll be able to learn more about that Shawn guy. Until then you’re stuck with Clancy.

Oh – and if you’re ever inclined to reach be by email you can use Shawn at my url above and after I get home I’ll give Clancy his own address too.